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At the Forge - Assessing Ruby on Rails

Issue 142

From Issue #142
February 2006

Jan 02, 2006  By Reuven M. Lerner
 in
All the dope on Zope versus Ruby on Rails.
Conclusion

Some people are hailing the arrival of Rails as the beginning of a new era in Web development. And indeed, I think Rails has set a new standard for what we can expect in a Web development framework. No longer will developers believe that it should take more than a few lines of code to create a “hello, world” program, or even to handle basic database actions.

Also, Rails is starting to convince developers that common conventions can be conducive to rapid, bug-free development. It took many years for developers to agree that garbage-collected languages were an improvement over malloc(), and it is taking a similarly long time for us to agree that conventions are better than configuration files. But the popularity of Rails probably means that we are increasingly ready for such a change.

Although no Web development framework is perfect, I believe that Rails has hit the sweet spot for many of the applications I have found myself writing for more than a decade. Both Ruby (the language) and Rails (the framework) are still maturing—but if this is how they are as relatively immature tools, I can't wait to see what they're like when they are finally ready.

Resources for this article: /article/8693.

Reuven M. Lerner, a longtime Web/database consultant, is currently a PhD student in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He and his wife recently celebrated the birth of their third child, a boy.

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